We're
here to explore the latest in collaborative
commerce and to learn how innovative companies are tapping into the networked economy.
We'll see how they are improving their business productivity and
sales, along with building far-reaching relationships with new partners
and customers.

Gardner: What do you mean by "view." If I have upgraded my iPhone, and I have this old one, what would I use you to do with it?

Thomson:
You would pull the old one out of your sock drawer, or whatever drawer
that you have it in, and you dust it off. You go over to your WiFi
network and download the Koozoo application, and that now makes your
phone a webcam that you can stream and point to a website, if you had a
website that you wanted to display it on, or on to the Koozoo site,
where it could be private for your consumption.

On a
personal level, it could be to make a baby monitor or something like
that for a limited community, like a neighborhood watch group or
merchant association that wanted to share their views or more broadly on
the Koozoo community.

Happening around town

If you look at Koozoo, it looks like we're making equivalent of Google Street View, but live. Right now, we're limited to San Francisco, but were able to see what's happening around town.

Gardner:
That’s really interesting. There is plethora of end devices that have
cameras and WiFi, and you're able to then take advantage of that and
give people the opportunity to innovate around the notion of either
public or private streams. Is it just live stream? How can people just
take a photo view every minute or six minutes, or anything like that?

Thomson:
Not just yet, but that is certainly the direction we are moving in
terms of building an ecosystem that allows you to make alerts for a
certain movement or alerts when there are certain sounds that are
anomalous, and are ones that you would want to record or see. But now,
it's just an ambient streaming.

Gardner: So
you're a startup -- resource constrained is, I believe, the way people
would refer to that -- and you still need to buy and sell goods and services.
When you were tasked with something that wasn’t a strategic, organized,
or recurring type of purchase, how did you find what you needed, and how
did Ariba factor into that?

Thomson: We're not
really a buying organization per se. We're an engineering-based company.
We have very few people and, when we need to buy something, it's
usually something like walking over to Office Depot and picking up a couple of pencils, because we need pencils.

As I got smarter about what I needed, I was able to communicate that with the potential vendors.

Primarily,
we had been looking at Amazon for that sort of purchase. As soon as we
needed to purchase a few more things, we moved from pure retail to more
of a wholesale sort of a buyer. We needed to buy more phones to do
testing on. We looked at Alibaba and we looked at Amazon,
primarily because I had only heard of those two, to buy larger quantity
of used mobile phones in this case, because I wanted to take advantage
of refurbished phones being more cost-effective for us for testing.

Gardner:
You had a need for buying used end-point devices, mobile phones,
smartphones, what have you. How did you find Ariba and how did you begin
the process?

Thomson: Initially I found Ariba
through an introduction. Somebody said, "If you're looking at Alibaba,
why don’t you look at Ariba? It's more suitable for what you're looking
for." And it certainly turned out to be the case.

Initially,
we made that one purchase and subsequent purchases of mobile devices.
It turned out to be a really good mechanism for doing some market analysis. I didn't know what I was buying. I'm not a mobile device expert, and I don’t come from consumer electronics.

I
was able to learn about what it was I didn’t know and be able to
iterate on my request for a purchase. I was able to iterate on that
publicly, so that everybody got to see. As I got smarter about what I
needed, I was able to communicate that with the potential vendors.

Sense of confidence

Gardner:
Because we're here at Ariba LIVE, the conference, we've been hearing
news from Ariba about spot buying as a capability they're investing in
and delivering through their network and Discovery process. Is there
something about having a pre-qualified list of suppliers that in some
way benefited you or gave you a sense of confidence vis-à-vis going
just on the open World Wide Web.

Thomson: I
don’t mean to be disparaging, but that was a little bit of the
experience on Alibaba. I did get a ton of responses that weren't
necessarily qualified and they weren't qualified, because they hadn’t
read my request very clearly. They were offering me something that
clearly wasn’t supporting what I needed, but rather was supporting what
they were trying to sell.

I had done some Google
searches and tried to find vendors, whether it was for these used
devices or for a specialized widget that I needed to have made and
sourced. So doing that on Google was pretty tough, time consuming, and
something that I wasn’t expert at.

I didn’t have the
capability to ask the right questions. I didn’t even know whether I was
in the ballpark of what expectations should be in terms of time for
delivery, cost, or what an acceptable small batch really was, because
initially I needed a small batch to test the product that I was
developing.

I see how we could position our profile on Ariba Discovery to respond
to inbound interest on that platform for something that we could solve.

Gardner:
Since you've found Ariba, have you been using it for other procurement,
and do you suspect that over time as you grow that more of that
strategic buying capability might be of interest to you?

Thomson:
Maybe. I don’t really see us ever becoming a very large buying
organization. If we continue to develop this product, we already have a
group of two or three suppliers that we've developed our relationship
with over Ariba Discovery, which is the the spot buying platform that
they have.

I don’t know if I necessarily would need
more. I don’t know what our procurement needs are going to be moving
forward. We're a little bit more interested in looking at it as a way to
respond to potential leads. I'm on the sales side, not on the
procurement side of our company.

As I look at moving
forward, we do need to capture new leads. I see how we could position our profile on Ariba Discovery to respond to inbound interest on that
platform for something that we could solve, whether that’s a
surveillance system, a public safety system, or something like that. We
would certainly be a very cost effective solution for that. So to be
able to respond to inbound interest could be a very good place for us to
go.

Gardner: So, it's a two-way channel. You
were able to use Ariba Discovery and spot buying to find goods and
services quickly and easily without a lot of preparation and
organization, and conversely, there might be a lot of buyers out there
using Ariba Discovery looking for a streaming capability and you would
be popping up on their lists. Have you done that yet? What's the plan?

Product-development cycle

Thomson:
That would be the hope, that there are a lot of people that want to buy
it and use it. I haven't focused on that just yet. As a company, we're
in a product-development
cycle, not really in the business development sales cycle just yet.
Ariba could be a very good way of figuring out what the market wants.

Gardner:
So, it's not just a sales execution channel, but also a market research
and business development channel, finding out what's available. You
don’t know what people want, until you get it out in front of them, and
of course, the spend for doing that through advertising or direct
marketing is pretty daunting. Something like Ariba Discovery gives you
that opportunity to do sales and research at no cost.

Thomson: It certainly does.

Gardner: Just to tease it out a bit more, because it's very interesting to me, did the devices that are supportive for you include the Android and iOS or are there others. If I wanted to download your app, what device would I need or at what prices would it be available to me?

You don’t know what people want, until you get it out in front of them,
and of course, the spend for doing that through advertising or direct
marketing is pretty daunting.

Thomson: Right now, we support the iOS suite, an iPad or an old iPhone, later than the 3GS generation.
Before that, they didn’t have the necessary hardware components, the
chip set, to support live streaming the way we do live streaming with
encoding.

We are on some Android platforms, but
Android is a very fragmented market, and as you develop toward Android,
you have to keep that in mind. So we focus on certain platforms within
the Android market first. As we define this product market fit, we will
develop the app and then propagate the Android market.

Gardner:
Well, very good to learn about you, and it's impressive on how you've
been able to leverage spot buying, and there is the potential for you to
have spot selling.

Thomson: Yes, sure.

Gardner:
Great. We've been talking about the mounting need for spot buying and
how a company in San Francisco, a startup has benefited from making this
a new competency. Please join me in thanking our guest Ian Thomson,
Koozoo’s Head of Business Development. Thank so much, Ian.

Thomson: Thank you.

Gardner:
And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to
you from the 2013 Ariba LIVE Conference in Washington D.C.

I'm
Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host
throughout this series of Ariba sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how spot buying and the Ariba Network
has given a startup firm a leg up on procurement needs. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.